Posts by Kevin 9

Go Patents!

Stealing productivity from Real GDP since the beginning of the Computer Revolution! Nothing like reinventing the wheel over and over again in slightly different ways and then letting lawyers fight over whether they are different enough or not.

Bandwidth

Until the bandwidth available over the air catches up to the needs of the vast majority of users, don't expect mobile SaaS to catch on. In most places in the world, mobile data is simply to expensive to consume letting your device communicate with an outside source whenever it needs work done instead of running it locally.

Once it becomes ubiquitous and cheap, maybe it will happen. But for me personally, I hate anything with a recurring fee so the value would have to be extraordinary to win me over.

Retail

Having worked in big box retail for years, I can tell you 30% is not a huge margin. Our average maintained margin across all products was around 27%, which resulted in around 2-3% percent net margin at the end of the year. And we benefited from doing about 60 million a year in sales, which most retailers do not do, so most would need to maintain a higher margin than that in order to run their business.

Windows brand?

Is it just me, or does it not make sense that microsoft keeps tying everything it does to the windows brand. I think that or the majority of people, the name Windows does not inspire happy feelings. More likely it feels like the thing that is probably the problem when their computer won't work. When I hear windows phone 7, my gut delong says buggy, security holes, and something that will only last 18 months.

I was with them until...

I was with them until discovering it will only run on Acer hardware? Really? As the article said, at least iTunes content will run on windows and mac devices.

I don't think anyone is going to knock iTunes off its perch until someone badgers the content providers into allowing DRM free video. Until then, I'll stick to the vendor that makes the DRM work as seamlessly as possible, and right now, that's Apple.

Canada

We already have this happening in Canada. At least one major ISP that I know of (Cogeco) freezes the connections of compromised accounts on a regular basis. I have seen this in person on several business and consumer accounts of people I know. The company is apparently monitoring traffic enough to recognize spam bots, trojans and DDOS attacks originating from their customers. And so far, they seem to be pretty good at it. Each time I've been called to help out someone who has lost their connection, I have found the problem that the ISP said they had.

Scumbag?

Really, a scumbag? Why? Whats the basis for that? If I had invested a thousand bucks (which is a lot of money for me) in something that later grew into a huge enterprise, I'd want my share. Why should I let it slide just because it's been a few years? I still risked my investment on you, so pay me.

DPI

The only way to ever control it is to outlaw encryption and deploy DPI tech on every connection throughout the world, policing every packet sent across every network. I don't think most of us would stand for anything like that, so I think the filesharers are safe.

I wonder...

I wonder how long it will take Apple to ship more iPads than the tablet PC has shipped since being conceived. I think I was the first person to buy one at the store I purchased it from. And I haven't encountered another person who has owned one in my day to day life.

I purchased a Tablet PC about 6 years ago to use for school. It was heavy, hot, slow, and the battery sucked. I had to carry an external battery around just to make it through two classes. It was clunky to use, the only useful app being OneNote. 45 -55 minutes of life, and that was after installing aftermarket software to lower the clock and voltage settings of the CPU. Oh, and the hinge cracked and broke within 18 months.

Having used the wife's iPad for about a month, I can tell that this thing would have been far more useful, paired with a small bluetooth keyboard, than my tablet PC ever was, and it costs about a third of the price. Even without a keyboard, for jotting notes, it's good enough.

Yes

We pay, but at least where I live, not much. The newspapers and magazines are so desperate for revenue that they give away newspapers for free, and magazine subscriptions for the cost of postage, just to sell the advertising space. I get 3 different newspapers delivered to my house (2 of them once a week, and the other Fridays and Saturdays) every week for free. And I had some family working in the papers. They have all moved on. Declining revenue meant many cuts over the years.

And as for magazines, I just got a subscription to a fairly popular magazine, one year, for 8 coke bottle caps. 8. I spent 8 bucks for a years subscription, and it include 16 liters of delicious coke.

Marketing

Amazing the amount of hate for advertising and revenue out there....

At the end of the day, somebody, somewhere has to pay for properly researched news. Someone has to pay the dude putting his life on the line reporting natural disasters or wars. Or the guy who spends his days researching financial news. Or whatever. If we eliminate advertising revenue and noone will pay to read, then they go the way of the dodo.

I, for one, don't want to live in the world where all our news comes from Joe the Plumber or whatever Billy no-name writes on his blog...

On a more on topic note, I enjoy firefox, though I have noticed it's memory footprint seems to get disproportionately large at times.

I quite enjoy....

I quite enjoy the basic functionality of iTunes, but I'd have to agree that it is useful only as the most basic way to organize music.

It annoys me to no end that I have to manually convert video to use on my ipod, basically requiring me to keep duplicates on any video files that I want to use on the big screen and on the ipod. It's fairly trivial these days to convert formats, so its quite inexcusable at this point.

Probably well played for MS

They really don't want to be associated with a show like that. I found the first couple seasons funny, but not so much anymore. The show is too offensive for a main stream company like Microsoft to associate themselves with. The last thing they need is the religious right or conservative organizations around the world to have such an easy target to demonstrate around. There are enough companies and people with an agenda to push against Microsoft that they were probably already planning how to use these pawns to their own ends to hurt them.

Good!

I rarely agree with people calling up their lawyers for every little thing, but in this case I do. My only regret is that it doesn't set a firm precedent on user control over their purchases. A good slap on the wrist for Amazon.

The Law

I keep wishing it for us here in Canada. Looks like you guys in the UK could use it too. We need a law which states that if a charge is not optional, it must be included in the upfront price. In this case, the S&H is not optional, so the word free should have been nowhere in the advertising schtick. Here in Canada, it really pisses me off that you can advertise a cell phone plan for $20 a month, but you cannot opt out of the 911 access fee or the system access fee or whatever other additional fees they wish to add.

I also love the idea of VAT. Not the having the pay tax part, but the posted price including all applicable taxes seems like a great idea. I encounter so many people who can't wrap their heads around adding 10-15% to items and can't understand what they are paying...

Probably Safe

Coming from a retail management background myself, I would suspect that this company uses the same standards for arresting shoplifters as I do, that being before I make an arrest, I ask myself "Am I sure enough that this person has stolen something that I would rest my career on it?" You only get one bad apprehension where I come from before being shown the door. So if the company is sure enough to post these pictures, you can be sure they have the evidence to back it up.